A glimpse of the future

Joseph Farah is founder, editor and CEO of WND and a nationally syndicated columnist with Creators News Service.. He is the author or co-author of 13 books, including his latest, "The Tea Party Manifesto," and his classic, "Taking America Back," now in its third edition and 14th printing. Farah is the former editor of the legendary Sacramento Union and other major-market dailies.

“Our republic and its press will rise and fall together,” said Joseph Pulitzer.

I agree with that statement. And I think it helps explain the deep social, moral, spiritual and intellectual voids in our nation today. The press, as an institution, long ago abandoned its responsibility, forsook its mission, lost its way.

Where did the press go wrong? It allowed itself to become hostage to a narrow worldview. It permitted itself to become captive to a political and social agenda. Worst of all, the press stopped comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable and became an advocate of bigger and more intrusive government in the lives of all Americans.

As a result, today we have a government-corporate-media complex — an alliance more dangerous than the military-industrial complex President Eisenhower warned about.

Why? The Founding Fathers understood that without a free and vital press serving as a watchdog on government — exposing fraud, waste, corruption and abuse — that the new republic would not long remain free and vital. That’s where we are today, folks.

But there’s some good news on the horizon. If the press and republic both fall and rise together, could the rise of the new media be a signal of renaissance for our great country, for freedom around the world? I think so.

Let’s face it. It’s getting harder and harder for the government-corporate-media complex to control the flow of information to the people. With the advent of the Internet and the synergy it has developed with talk radio, the hammerlock has been broken.

The success of WorldNetDaily is a good example of what I’m talking about. A year and a half ago, this Internet newspaper was launched with little fanfare as an experiment in electronic publishing. Today it consistently receives more than 500,000 hits a day and is read in at least 86 countries.

Why do they come? Because of our commitment to the traditional role of the press — the role the establishment media forgot. We believe the central role of a free press in a free society is to serve as a watchdog on government — to expose fraud, waste, corruption and abuse wherever we find it.

People respond to that simple mission, that honest credo, that clear objective. We, too, like to have fun with the news — looking for the offbeat stories, the eclectic, yes, even the weird. But it all seems to make sense when there’s context to the news, and readers understand your point of view and that you have no hidden agenda.

The other twist that this new medium of the Internet provides is the ability to go where the news is — to utilize the resources of hundreds of English-language news services around the world. No longer are Americans reliant on one monopoly news agency — the Associated Press — for 90 percent of their information, as they have been for the last 20 years.

We think this is a significant breakthrough. Because only an informed, literate and moral America can make the right choices in the future. And WorldNetDaily, believe it or not, is having an impact — not only on the hundreds of thousands of people around the world who count on it as a primary source of news — but through secondary sources and analysts our news agenda affects.

I would dare say there isn’t a significant talk-show host in the country who is not plugged into WorldNetDaily today. I can tell by the requests we get for interviews. We can’t handle them all — and we have never solicited a single program for an interview.

Oh, I’m sure there will be competition emerging from others who see our success and try to imitate it. But WorldNetDaily is different. Because we are not flying by the seat of our pants. We are building this new medium with a generation of experience in the old media.

We have standards. And they are standards the old media can’t question, because they are the original, traditional standards of American journalism
– the standards that helped set America apart as a free country.

So, as far as we’re concerned, this is just the beginning. If you are reading this column, you are part of a bold, innovative revolution in media. Isn’t that exciting? And don’t you think it bodes well for our country and our world?